Some casket designs incorporate decorative or ornamental corner pieces secured to the casket during fabrication thereof. In many, if not most, prior designs, these ornamental corner pieces are rigidly affixed to the casket shell. Consequently, if a customer purchasing the casket is not pleased with the particular pre-installed ornamental corner pieces, and wishes to customize the casket exterior to his or her taste, the funeral director must go through a lengthy and complicated process to first remove the original ornamental corner pieces and then reinstall the ornamental corner pieces chosen by the customer. This process typically requires manual manipulation and access to the interior of the casket which may require the removal of bedding, lining, and the like. Such a process is time consuming and can damage the otherwise new casket and is thus frowned upon and generally avoided by the funeral director.
To more effectively market caskets, the funeral director desires to offer a wide variety of ornamental corner pieces from which a customer can select according to the customer's taste. However, to offer such a wide selection, and to avoid the undesirable practice mentioned above, the funeral director would have to maintain a large inventory of many different casket material/finish and corner piece combinations, which is also undesirable. To minimize the required inventory of finished caskets, the funeral director could simply have one casket of each material/finish provided that the funeral director had some means providing for the quick and efficient changing of the ornamental corner pieces on each casket. As such, the customer could quickly view numerous corner pieces on a single casket, and the funeral director would need only stock a single casket of each material/finish. Prior casket designs, which rigidly affix the ornamental corner pieces, do not permit such quick and efficient changing of the ornamental corner pieces as discussed above.
What is needed, therefore, is an attachment mechanism to permit the quick and efficient installation and removal of ornamental corner pieces onto and from caskets. The attachment mechanism should also permit attachment of existing ornamental corner pieces which are designed to be rigidly attached, i.e., allow for retrofitting of current fixed corner pieces such that they, too, are quickly and efficiently installed and removed.